Tizen Association Gets Fifteen New Members

Tizen Association, an industry consortium that supports the development of an open source Tizen software platform and operating system, has announced that it had been joined by fifteen additional members. The new members will contribute to Tizen’s eco-system, but the question is whether they will be able to finally bring Tizen-based products to market in foreseeable future.

Intel Corp. and Samsung Electronics, two companies who developed Tizen, established the Tizen Association along with 34 other members in November, 2014. With the new companies who joined the organization, Tizen platform can boast support from as many as 49 companies worldwide, quite a lot for a software that has not really made it to the market.

“The Tizen Platform represents the best green field opportunity in the connected device space that we’ve seen. It is a dynamic platform that allows us to capitalize on our deep skills in creating hybrid applications, and gives commercial software teams like ours an innovative new palette of tools and techniques to work with,” said Chuck Shotton, chief technology officer of DynAgility.

The newest members include mobile game publishers, operators, application developers, mobile software management vendors and major telecommunications companies. New members have the potential to join relevant Tizen Association Working Groups and to participate in Tizen Association meetings, giving them more access, insight and input into the development of the Tizen OS.

Among the members of the Tizen Association there are Huawei, Samsung and ZTE. However, none of them except Samsung has announced plans to make Tizen based smartphones. Moreover, even Samsung has delayed its Tizen-powered handset for a number of times.

Tizen has a lot of similarities with Mozilla’s FireFox OS. Both are are standards-based, cross-architecture software operating systems for various devices. Both platforms leverage the robustness and flexibility of HTML5 which is rapidly emerging as a preferred application environment for mobile applications. However, since the two are still different, they cannot run the same software.

Late last year a high-ranking executive from Samsung called Mozilla to cooperate with Tizen to ensure software compatibility. Since both FireFox OS and Tizen are based on HTML5, Mozilla, Intel and Samsung can cooperate on the platform and software development tools level to ensure that once HTML5 application is written, it can run on both platforms.